Solved!
Go to SolutionRadeon 5970 "Driver Stopped Responding"
Hi All. I've got a Studio XPS 9100 Win7 desktop and It came from the factory with a Ati Radeon 5970.
Right out of the box, the first time it was booted I had all sorts of crashed related to Video.
The one constant error I get now that I've reloaded all the driver and Catalyst CC is "Display Driver AMD has stopperd responding and has recovered".
But the unit either reboots every time or it "re-starts". But it happens every time.
If I, once again, uninstall all the Ati drivers all works fine.
I worked for DAYS to try to fix it and ended up uninstalling all the Ati specific driver and Catalyst Control Center and using the generic video drivers.
I had read many, many reports of the same problem and also many suggested fixes none of which worked.
But I've got a high end video card that just does not work and I cannot take advantage of the capabilities of the expensive card.
I don't think I'm asking too much to have it work am I?
I have read that some people have had to get BOTH their card AND Motherboard replaced, sometimes several times.
I'm asking if anyone else has been thru these problems with the ATi cards ?
Did anything fix it for you ?
Thanks for any help.
Hi Osprey4.
I have tried the Dell supplied driver which includes CCC.... and I have tried the latest drivers directly from the AMD site.
I have not figured out how to load just the drivers without CCC as the packages I download all automatically install CCC.
Maybe I can uninstall CCC afterwards thru Control Panel, but I worry about remnants of CCC in the reg.
I removed all AMD/Ati drivers and use the generic VGA driver within Win7.
OK.. I was able to install JUST the drivers by using the "Custom" install instead of the Express. But to no avail. I still get the same error "Display driver AMD has stopped responding".
I get a black screen and the it seems the driver reloads, but I have no mouse pointer and have to start the Task Manager and my mouse pointer appears again.
Any suggested settings for the clock speeds or voltage settings or any other settings zi can adjust to fix this problem?
The 5970 BIOS version is 012.020.000.028, I wonder if there is a new BIOS I can try to flash to the video board?
At this point, no hardware issue is indicated, which is consistent with the error. What you're getting is a TDR error, which are not uncommon for AMD cards (one reason I avoid them).
Have you already worked through the solutions in this article? Since your problem occurred right out of the box, I don't think it's an overheating issue, so I would look at solutions that involve updating the system BIOS, updating DirectX, etc.
If things don't improve, the next thing to do is back up your files and restore the Dell OS. That will restore the original driver that shipped with the system, which you will then need to update, so have the current AMD driver handy.
I went ahead and ran the Dell Diagnostics on the video card, and for good measure I ran it on the entire system.
I booted from the Diagnostics disc.
Everything check out OK. No problems reported using the Dell Diagnostics.
But I STILL have the persistent driver crash and now I am getting system freezes.
I went and uninstalled the ATI drivers and CCC and used the generic VGA drivers and it's working OK.
So... what do think? Is my video card bad, or the Mother Board or something else incompatible.
I absolutely DREAD having to call support as I know I'm have to talk to 4-5 agents and they will ALL ask me the SAME thing and do the same thing. Uninstall drivers... reinstall drivers... run diagnostics... open up the case and check the cables and re-seat the video board... boot into safe mode and report what happens..... blah blah blah.
I have ALREADY done all of that numerous times.
I think they need to try sending me a new video card. But to get to that point, will take DAYS of my time.
I appreciate any other suggestion that I can try......
Hi osprey4, I had tried most of the solutions on that list in the article fro ATI, but I'll go thru them again and see if I come across something that will work or something that I missed.
I no longer have the Dell Recovery Partition as I have already tried it and it was apparently corrupt. So I have done a clean install of Win7 already.
I have D/L the original drivers from the "MYDELL" site as well as tried the ones on the disc that Dell sent to me. I have also already tried the latest and greatest drivers directly from ATI with no luck and the same error(s).
I was going to put myself thru torture and call dell Tech Support, but on a whim, I tried the "CHAT" with support and amazingly, I got someone who listened to everything I had already tried and said I should try a new video card. So I have one being sent to me in a few days (depending on stock availability).
As I said earlier, sometimes a new board with a new BIOS works and sometimes it took a MB replacement.
other
I do have the latest MB BIOS (A04), but I wonder if there are updated MB Chip versions, or does the BIOS from Dell supply those as well ?
For now, to keep my XPS working, I am running on the generic VGA drivers and am waiting for the new Video card.
I will try following more of those troubleshooting tips from ATI.... maybe I'll get lucky !
Hi osprey4.
Here is an update: I installed the replacement 5970 evening and was still using the generic VGA drivers and all seemed good. Then I downloaded the latest and greatest drivers and CCC from AMD/ATI. Everything booted up fine.
Everything "seemed" ok for while but I got a BSOD out of nowhere.
I rebooted and kept getting an error that "The checksum file is possibly corrupt. the file header checksum does not match the computed checksum."
If I hit the ALT-CTR-DEL key it would then continue to boot.
THEN... I started getting error messages that the "PFN_LIST_CORRUPT" and a stop code of "0x0000004E".
I believe this pointed to a memory problem. If I kept trying, I could get it to boot all the way occasionally, but often times had to force a shutdown and reboot.
I inserted the most recent Dell Diagnostics disk that Dell sent me and ran the memory diagnostics. It Failed the "Stress Test" immediatley. I did this several times and it failed each time. Unfortunately, it gave no indication of which memory was "failing" as I have 12GB of memory = 6x2GB sticks. To add to the problem, it is my understanding that the memory test performs a test on ALL of the memory on the PC including the memory on the video card.
To add another twist.... I booted into the Dell Diagnostics partition on the desktop which came with the diagnostics. It is obviously an "Older" version of the diagnostics. Perplexingly, the memory test run my this older version indicated that the memory was all OK. I repeated the test back and forth between the new version and old version of the Dell diagnostics. Each time the memory failed the stress test using the new version but passed using the old diagnostics version. WEIRD !
Several times in attempting a reboot, It looked like some sort of very primary BIOPS setup screen came up from "American Megatrend" that said it was initializing some sort of USB's devices" It would do whatever it was doing and then continue on. I have no idea what that was all about, nor why it ws initializing any sort of USB items. It did some "AutoDetecting" of things as well.
Anyway.... just for giggles, I opened up the case again and reseated all the memory sticks. But then my PC failed to boot at all. So I actually moved the memory sticks around and seated them all back in and I had success in booting.
This morning B4 I left for work, I inserted my "MEMTEST" disk and it will be running all day until I get home.
I did a very short running of MEMTEST last night too, and no problems were indicated.
Maybe the repositioning and reseating of the sticks did the trick... or maybe it was a temporary thing.
As far as the replacement video card, at least it seems to be working. I suspect I had, or have, a sketchy stick of memory and "maybe" moving them around fixed it.
I'll let you know how I make out next.
I plan to download and run the "Afterburner" video stress test to more specifically test the video card and video card memory.
Thanks, Tim
pratzert
2 Intern
•
179 Posts
1359
1
Posted April 20th, 2013 10:00
Osprey4,
I have received the replacement HD from Dell. As far as I know, since it's a replacement drive, ti will NOT have the Dell Diagnostics partition on it. I have not installed it an looked, but I doubt that it any partitions of any sort on it... just a bare clean drive.
On my existing Disk 0 (primary) drive I have 3 partitions.... OEM, Recovery and C:.
The recovery partition is likely the OEM Image from the Factory and it nothing but trash at this point as I was never able to get to it at all. I "guess" the OEM partition is the Diagnostics, and the C: is where the OS is installed (Win7).
Since the Recovery partition is non-re-creatable I don't need to worry about it.
But I wouldn't mind having the Diagnostics Partition on the primary drive. I have done some research and it's not particularly an easy thing to do.
One way may be to D/L the Acronis Image program from the Seagate site and try to clone the primary drive and then I think there is a method to actually update the Diagnostics to a new version.
I have seen some posts about a way to actually create the Diagnostics Partition which seems a lot more convoluted and confusing and some people claim it does not work.
Do you have suggestions on how to proceed with that process, or do you think I would be just as well off to run the Diagnostics from the CD when needed ?
Thanks